Page images
PDF
EPUB

than edifying. In the same way it was, and may be still, believed, that if you enter a cowhouse at midnight on Christmas eve, you will find the animals on their knees.

EUSEBIA. And Shakspere will tell you that

"Some say, that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our SAVIOUR'S Birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning croweth all night long."

PISTUS. A truer symbolism than any of the above is, I think, to be found in the hatred that all ages and nations have borne to serpents. "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed," seems to have been literally as well as metaphorically fulfilled.

SOPHRON. The symbolism of the chrysalis and the butterfly had been discovered long before the fall of paganism, as the Greek name for the latter plainly showed. It is a marvellously true emblem; almost sufficient to prove that which it represents.

THEODORA. It is growing late; we cannot enter on our next subject to-night. And we shall find it, I think, even more interesting than that of this evening.

PISTUS. Unless it be through our own faults. Good night.

NIGHT III.

AERIAL APPARITIONS.

SOPHRON. It would be a curious subject of inquiry, why the inhabitants of mountainous regions are so much more given to believe in tales of supernatural incident, than those who live in the flatter and tame parts of the same country.

PISTUS. The habit of constant communion with nature in her deepest solitude has a necessary tendency to make the mind reverential. With such beauty and majesty continually before the eye, it seems almost to follow, that the power which made and sustains all these things must be also recognized; a kind of perpetual converse with the unseen world is maintained; and, where nothing of human littleness may be visible in the course of a long day, the traveller naturally turns his thought to those unseen companions whom he believes to be accompanying him. So much for the moral grounds. Then for the physical; the wonderful phenomena of light and shade; the extraordinary sounds which are familiar to mountain ears; the opening out of a new kind of land

scape, fantastical beyond the wildest valleys of earth-I mean cloud scenery; the hours of intense stillness; the clearness and brightness of the atmosphere; the lightness of the air; the necessity of observing those little signs of approaching tempest which a common eye and ear would fail to catch; all these things may be, in part, the cause of this-superstitious, to use the modern phrase-feeling in mountaineers.

SOPHRON. And not only so; but there is no doubt that constant association with magnificent scenes calls out all the affections of the mind in their full force. Wilberforce, I think, somewhere remarks, that he always seemed to love his friends better in a mountainous country than any where else; and doubtless it was more than seeming.

PISTUS. Sailors also, who, though in a different manner, are conversant with the most sublime scenes, are naturally credulous of supernatural tales. And it is curious that, both in their case and in that of mountaineers, this feeling should be united with great physical courage; whereas soldiers who are, in time of peace, usually immured in towns, and, in that of war, are most commonly located in flat and uninteresting countries, are given to scepticism rather than superstition.

EUSEBIA. Yet sometimes they will exhibit great sensitiveness to natural scenery. The German troops, who, in the rising of 1745, were advancing on Inverness, could hardly be prevailed on to enter

the pass of Killicrankie, so terrified were they at the stupendous height of its mountains.

PISTUS. Closely connected with this is the almost invincible desire which many persons feel to precipitate themselves from the summit of a high place. There is a precipice in Sky where tourists are usually held by their guides, lest its dizzy height should induce them to throw themselves

over.

THEODORA. I should think it probable that some, at least, of the suicides committed from the top of the Monument, were the effect of the same feeling. In cases where the person who thus destroyed himself was actuated by no known cause, and appeared in good spirits at the time of his ascent, it is not only most charitable, but really also most likely, that he should have been carried away by the frantic desire that most persons, in a slight degree, have felt.

SOPHRON. It is well known that there are places in the Alps, and in the Andes, where such panics are not unusual, and where they are almost certain death. The only remedy in such cases is, to look up; and if you can do that steadily for a few moments you are saved.

PISTUS. Yes; if it is into the clear blue open sky; but (I can speak from my own experience) there are cases where the looking up makes bad worse. If a precipice towers above you on one side, while it yawns beneath you on the other, the additional height does but distress you the

more; and if, besides this, light fleecy clouds are flitting rapidly over the summit, it is dizzy work indeed.

EUSEBIA. It must be:-it turns the brain to stand, on a March day, at the bottom of a church tower, and, looking up steadily to the vane, to watch it as the clouds drive past it. To do so without feeling giddy requires a very steady head indeed.

PISTUS. I believe that people with the strongest nerves have the most dreadful fits of panic when they have them at all. I have wandered far and wide in the most precipitous places of mountains, and never felt it but once. I had a mind to try if the Pico do Cidrão, one of the loftiest and, at the same time, steepest mountains of Madeira, could not be scaled from the Pico dos Arrieiros. It was a fine day in spring: we tethered our horses on the Arrieiros, and then, with our mountain poles and a shepherd for guide, we committed ourselves to the narrow isthmus that joins the two mountains. Narrow it is; for on either side it slopes down almost perpendicularly into an abyss of some two thousand feet, while, at the top, it is in many places not more than eight feet broad, and its material of crumbling scoria. Indeed, so thin is it, that it vibrates or seems to vibrate in a heavy gale. When we had accomplished half the distance, we sat down to rest, and gaze at the wonderful chasms which opened below us. Seeing a small crack in the earth,

« PreviousContinue »